Monthly Archives: March 2015

I flip­pantly commented on Twitter earlier that StaffPad, a new music notation app for Microsoft Surface, had a likely audience of one—Alan Pierson, the lone musician Surface-owner I know. It’s easy to poke fun at dorky old Microsoft, but I’m genuinely just sore that I can’t try out the app. To expend as much devel­op­ment effort as StaffPad clearly has only to address the 2% share of tablets that run Windows seems like a risky business strategy, to put it mildly; I sincerely hope they’re success­ful, though, because promis­ing new software in this category doesn’t come along often. The target audience is small to begin with, and the number of talented musician-program­mers even smaller, I’d imagine.

But I have wanted a way to “do music” on my phone and iPad for awhile, and nothing I’ve seen has quite fit the bill.

The hypo­thet­i­cal software I’ve been imag­in­ing is far less elaborate—a compan­ion to big notation programs rather than a replace­ment for them. The inter­face would be a blank sheet of music paper, and you’d just draw on it. Notes, shapes, pictures, text, whatever. Add a simple filing system, to keep all your related sketches together, along with voice memos and photos. The result would be the digital equiv­a­lent of a music Mole­sk­ine, or like a musi­cally-oriented Vesper. Maybe it could have some kind of hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion to clean up the input a bit.

Fully expect­ing like a dozen venture capi­tal­ists to get at me right after I hit publish on this. It’ll be the next Facebook, I tell ya!

I always thought it was a kind of swanning, put on for dramatic display, and just yester­day noticed that I was doing it—alone, in a window­less practice room in the basement of Davies Hall. Just who was I trying to impress?

Dismayed, I scanned through a video from my recital at the Phillips collec­tion and noticed I was doing it there, too.

I have a theory (I almost always have a theory). On both occa­sions, I was trying to quickly accli­mate to unfa­mil­iar pianos (some­thing pianists have to learn to do regu­larly). Perhaps I was uncon­sciously trying to distance myself from the sound of the instru­ment, much as one would walk around differ­ent loca­tions of a hall to gauge the sound of someone else playing.

I can’t imagine moving one’s head back­wards a foot or so actually changes the percep­tion of sound much—though maybe it does? Perhaps someone who knows more about hearing or sound percep­tion would care to comment.

Still have no idea why a pianist’s head would move in the opposite direc­tion, though: